Liú Qí 劉祁 (1203–1250), zì Jīngshū 京叔, self-styled Shénchuān dùnshì 神川遯士 (“Reclusive Scholar of Shénchuān”), native of Húnyuán 渾源 in Dàtóng 大同 prefecture (modern north-eastern Shānxī). Of the long-established Húnyuán Liú lineage that had served the Jīn dynasty through several generations: his grandfather Liú Wéi 劉撝 was a Jīn jìnshì and held local office; his father 劉從益 Liú Cóngyì 劉從益 (zì Yúnqīng 雲卿; CBDB 28853) was a jìnshì of Tàihé 3 (1203) who served as Imperial Censor (Jiànyì dàifū) under Xuānzōng and Āizōng. Liú Qí was raised in his father’s official residences south of the Yellow River, principally at Nánjīng (i.e., Kāifēng / Biànjīng 汴京, the late-Jīn capital after the abandonment of Zhōngdū in 1214). There he studied under the leading Zhèngdà — Tiānxīng generation literati 趙秉文 Zhào Bǐngwén, 李純甫 Lǐ Chúnfǔ, and Wáng Ruòxū 王若虛, and was closely associated with the slightly older 元好問 Yuán Hǎowèn — relationships preserved in juàn 1–6 of his Guīqián zhì.
He sat the Tiānxīng 1 (1232) jìnshì examination at Biànjīng without passing; that same year the Mongol siege began. Through the spring of 1233 he was inside the city — through Āizōng’s flight (late 1232), the failed defence by Wányán Nǔshēn, the surrender to Sùbùtái 速不台 (May 1233), and the coup of Cuī Lì 崔立. In the aftermath of the surrender he was coerced to draft the self-laudatory Cuī Lì bēi (an episode he defends in juàn 12 of his work as composed under duress, the text deliberately encoded for later repudiation). With the rest of the Biànjīng literati he was deported north by the Mongols and made his way “from Wèi past Qí into Yān, in all two thousand lǐ” back to his ancestral Húnyuán in jiǎwǔ (1234), aged 32. There he built a study named Guīqián 歸潛 (“retreat-in-hiding”) and began the Guīqián zhì KR3l0079, the principal Jīn-historiographic source after the lost Rénchén zábiān of Yuán Hǎowèn — composed in layers from 1235 through the early 1240s.
In wùxū (1238) he accepted the new Mongol-controlled administration’s call to office, placing first in the Nánjīng selection-examination held under the Yēlǜ Chǔcái 耶律楚材 reforms; he was appointed Shānxī Dōnglù kǎoshì guān (Examination Officer for the Eastern Circuit of Shānxī) and then attached to the Cóngzhēng Nánxíngshěng (Punitive Southern Branch Secretariat) under Yán Shí 嚴實, where he served some seven years before his death in 1250. MíngQīng moralists (including the Sìkù compilers) reproached him for not maintaining “the Western Hills’ integrity” — i.e., for serving the conquering dynasty — but modern scholarship treats his career as typical of his generation of Hàn-Chinese literati under the early Mongol regime, comparable to the careers of Yuán Hǎowèn’s other students.
Apart from the Guīqián zhì, his collected shīwén is preserved in fragmentary form (the work is included as juàn 14 of the Guīqián zhì itself in the 14-juàn recension; an independent Shénchuān dùnshì jí 神川遯士集 in 3 juàn once existed but is lost). For his life see Wáng Yùn’s 王惲 Húnyuán shìdé bēi (the genealogical stele of the Húnyuán Liú lineage), preserved in Qiūjiàn jí 秋澗集 juàn 56; and the modern study by Hok-lam Chan (1970), The Historiography of the Chin Dynasty, pp. 121–88. CBDB person 28855.